Second, pay special attention to the education of those who lack basic financial knowledge and have poor families. For example, the office specializes in providing financial security services for Hispanic women.
Third, the training content is varied. The training programs provided by the office rarely directly involve the stock market. On the contrary, most of the projects are popular introductions in areas highly related to the capital market, including income tax collection, banking services, personal debt management and social security mechanisms.
The Federal Reserve has also established a financial education website, the main content of which is to spread financial knowledge and help investors protect themselves. It mainly introduces macroeconomic indicators, currency creation mechanism, foreign exchange transactions, housing mortgage loans, interest rate determination and financial market tools. In addition, as the regulator of the securities market, the US Securities and Exchange Commission also has an investor education office, which is responsible for handling complaints, safeguarding investors' rights and interests, disclosing financial information and answering investors' difficult questions.
At the local government level, many states have also set up corresponding financial education departments. It is in this intensive all-round financial education atmosphere that American investors basically have a healthy investment mentality.
Government departments should play a leading role.
Based on the investigation of American practices and the actual situation in China, China should at least strengthen in the following two aspects.
First, strengthen the popularization of basic financial knowledge and introduce various tools in the capital market in a balanced way. Only by mastering basic financial knowledge can investors improve their financial literacy and be more calm and objective when investing. But objectively speaking, China investors not only lack modern financial knowledge, their limited financial knowledge is mainly obtained from the stock market, and the financial education of investors by relevant departments is also narrowly focused on the stock field. In fact, this kind of investor education is a kind of negative education with biased orientation, which not only ignores the importance and long-term nature of daily investment and financial management, but also strengthens investors' awareness of getting rich and their speculative preference for the stock market.
Second, establish the main position of government departments rather than intermediaries in financial education. Although financial intermediaries also play an educational role, they only play an auxiliary role. On the one hand, it is because of differences of interest. Compared with government departments, the majority of intermediaries actually have competitive interests with individual investors, and their positions are relatively less objective and neutral than those of government departments. On the other hand, it is because of different responsibilities. Education and management are the responsibility of the government, and the regulatory authorities should make more efforts in this respect, instead of pushing it to financial intermediaries. At most, financial intermediaries have the obligation to inform, but not to educate.
It is worth noting that although the investor education in the United States is far ahead of that in China, the subprime mortgage crisis still occurs, which shows that in the increasingly complex capital market and increasing financial derivatives, investor education should not only be promoted for a long time, but also focus on knowledge updating. Only in this way can investor education achieve better results.